Bittersweet
by Shootingstar7123
Summary: I can’t help but think that all those things were supposed to be mine. Cameron’s thoughts after episode 104, “Maternity”.


Bittersweet

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A/N: You may be a bit confused if you don't remember the end of Maternity. Hasn't been proofread—I will probably resubmit this at a later date with a few adjustments.

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Unnecessary disclaimer: None of the characters appearing in the TV show "House, M. D." belong to me.

Abstract: I can't help but think that all those things were supposed to be mine. Cameron's thoughts after episode 104, "Maternity".

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I am happy for them. Really.

But I can't deny that it was painful to watch the family leave with everything in tact.

Don't get me wrong; I didn't want them to leave brokenhearted, to lose their child and possibly their marriage. But I can't help but think that all those things were supposed to be mine.

How is it that I have to go home to an empty apartment? That all I have to look forward to at home is solitude and memory of the good old days that weren't all so happy?

Why is it that I am broken and they are whole?

Asking these questions is an exercise in futility; I know the unfairness of life firsthand.

The memories flood my mind as I drive home to that empty apartment. I pull a bottle of wine from the rack, fingering first the bottle gifted to us on our wedding day. I don't think I will ever be able to open it.

No, the bottle I pull is a ten-dollar bottle that I bought at the liquor store the prior month, the bottle purchased not to share with company, but for drunken solitude, for dreamless sleep.

I let the tears flow freely as I pull down the wedding album from its high shelf and thumb through the pages. We still had hopes then.

There is something about youth that makes us believe that bad things won't happen to us. We were sure that we would beat the cancer. How quickly things can change.

We had plans for the future. I had applied to medical school. He wanted to be a piano teacher, with a fiery passion that sometimes made me envy him. He would go anywhere with me that I required for my career. All that he needed was the piano and enough students to get by. We wanted children someday.

We froze the sperm shortly before he began chemo. We were told it would make him sterile. Despite what the doctors were saying, we still planned for our future together. My thoughts briefly move to the sperm bank in Chicago that still holds them for me. This wasn't how they were meant to be used.

My mind returns to the family that left the hospital earlier today. I can't help but be envious. I should still be married. I should be a mom. It just isn't fair.

We were married for six months. We were optimistic for four.

The last two months of his life we stopped planning. His life was ending soon. Mine may as well have.

Those two months are a blur. They aren't the days I try to remember. My husband was less and less himself, less the man I married, less the man I fell in love with.

There were always two of us there with him. His parents couldn't bear to see their child this way, so they didn't visit much when he was awake. But his best friend and I were always there. We never acted on it, but we both knew of the feelings that secretly grew between us. It wasn't the first time or the last that I cursed the lack of control I had over my heart. I don't think my husband ever suspected. I don't think I will ever forgive myself.

In the movies when people die it's always raining, as if the world mourns with them. The sun was shining fiercely the day my husband died. I think it shone just to spite me. The world was going on while mine was ending.

I didn't cry. I didn't faint. I didn't curse God. I had begun my mourning two months before. This wasn't a surprise. I sat almost calmly with my cup of coffee as the doctors entered to give me the news. His mother sobbed. His best friend broke his hand punching a wall. But I, his wife, did nothing.

The sun continued to shine the day of the funeral. Women wilted in their mourning weeds under the sun of a Midwestern summer. I stood, gaunt and ghostlike, in the dress my mother picked out for me. Afterwards I spent a month hiding in the tiny apartment we had called home. I wore his clothing, trying to capture the last of his scent before it was gone forever.

I should have realized it when I hardly kept any food down for over a month. But nothing clued me in until the blinding pain and bleeding that brought me to the hospital on that fateful day that summer. Funny, mourning and pregnancy have many of the same symptoms.

Somehow, in the stress of the last few months of my husband's life, I never noticed the missed periods. We stopped using protection once he started the chemo. We thought he would be sterile. Who knew that such a small decision could cause such pain?

I cried over this loss. It's a very odd thing to lose something you never knew you had.

I knew, even then, that I was too young. Would I have made it through med school as a single mom? I don't know. But I would have had his child. A child we had created together, not one produced in a lab. Knowing I wasn't ready for child didn't prevent the grief.

From the hospital I went home and took a look at the letters from medical schools across the country. I had applied in better days and hadn't had the heart to look at them. Some were months old. However, something had altered in me. I had to move on with my life. Something had to change.

I blindly chose the furthest school from home. What once would have been a carefully planned decision between two partners became a lonely woman playing a game of chance.

A couple of months later I found myself studying medicine in the Northeast. I hoped that distance could dull the pain of my twofold loss.

It didn't hurt less, but it became easier to live with the pain. Some days now, I don't even think of it.

So, yes, I was jealous today. That woman went home with both her husband and child… What would I give to have either one of those things?

I drink myself into a fitful sleep, my dreams haunted by his face, his blue eyes. I wake up a little worse for the wear, but the cup of coffee and carefully applied makeup attempt to hide it. I know another set of blue eyes that won't be so easily fooled.

But I put on a brave mask and head out to face the world. Maybe one of these days it won't be a façade. Maybe I'll be brave enough to call up the sperm bank and have my husband's child on my own. Or maybe I'll be brave enough to destroy that possibility and let the future pull me along with the tide.

In any case, the future is open, and today maybe I'll be brave enough to see what it has in store for me.

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End file.
